Each of us is born a unique individual
with a unique potential. Unfortunately, parents too often
use their children to satisfy their own unmet childhood
needs, and fail to help them develop their own potential.
The nature of human consciousness is such that children
can be conditioned to serve their parents, but at a great
mental, emotional, and spiritual cost. In this article,
Dr. Jay Kantor discusses how we can throw off the effect
of destructive conditioning and end the suffering it
creates.

For many people, the desire for a happy
and peaceful life remains unfulfilled. Instead of
happiness, many of us find ourselves frequently disturbed
by anger, fear or sadness, or the feeling of being
disconnected and separate from life. We seek love, but we
cannot find love or cannot sustain the love we find.

Unhappy Parents, Unhappy Children

When we look back at our family and the
society we come from, it is often easy to see that we
come from parents and ancestors who also had problems
finding happiness. For those of us who are plagued by
painful emotions and troubled relationships, it is
probably hard to find healthy and mature caregivers in
our past. Instead, we find parents who were neglected,
abused, or abandoned by their parents, who didn't value
themselves, who couldn't cope with their feelings of
sadness or their shame or their anger, and acted more
like children than adults. When immature parents don't
want to parent us, they often force us to grow up too
soon, so that they will not need to parent us. In a cruel
and desperate twist, they may even try to make us into
the parents they never had.

The Destructive Power OfConditional Love

One of the most critical things we
get from our childhoods is a sense of self-worth which is
often called our self-esteem. The dictionary
defines self-esteem as, "pride in oneself", and
pride means, "a sense of one's own proper
dignity or value; self-respect". The primary source
of our self-esteem is how we are esteemed by our
caregivers. Unfortunately, when we are brought up by
people who have not been valued by their parents, they do
not value or respect us either. So we come away from
childhood, to a lesser or greater degree, undervalued and
disrespected.In
everyday language, we say that the people who esteem,
value, and respect us are the ones who love us.
And our parents are supposed to love us and we are
supposed to love them. Yet, what does it mean to
love? There is so much pressure to love and be seen as a
loving person that we profess our love as a matter of
course, at the drop of a hat. Only a "bad"
parent doesn't love her child, and only a
"rotten" child doesn't love her mother.Yet, the
truth is, were we to tell it, that we may hate the people
we're supposed to love. But we pretend to love
them anyway, so that we don't have to feel that we're
bad, ungrateful people. We'd rather be liars than commit
the "sin" of being unloving. Society insists so
strongly that we be loving, and we so much want to be
loved, that we compromise the truth of our hearts for
other people's support and for our own survival.In our
immature and sick society, love has become, "If you
don't love me and give me what I want, I'll hate you, and
you'll pay!" It is love under the threat of
abandonment, which is, in the final analysis, not love at
all. It is conditional love. It's using love as a
weapon -- using our withdrawal, our withholding of love,
as a selfish means of control.And so our
self-esteem, our self-worth, has been made conditional,
dependent upon the whims of the ones called our parents.
There is no better way to gain control over a person than
to make him believe he is bad and worthless, and that you
can make him feel good and worthy, if only he will do
"the right things". They say to us, "You'd
be lovable and praiseworthy only if....", to which
the love starved child in us says, "Just tell me
what I have to do".

Adopting A False Solution

It is from these painful,
unfulfilling relationships with the adult children who
were our parents that we learned that relationships are
not safe. Having been hurt, we learned that we needed to
protect ourselves from being hurt again. In order to do
this, children are forced to give up being open,
vulnerable, loving and connected. They are forced to give
up the way they naturally are. Overall, we protect
ourselves by separating from the things that cause us
pain: our parents, our real needs and desires, our real
feelings, our thoughts, our actions, and our bodies. We
become separate from ourselves and what really is.Rather
than living our lives out of who we really are and what
we really feel, we begin to construct a false, but safer,
more socially acceptable persona based on the demands of
those upon whom we depend. When we operate out of our
false self, our natural response to a situation is
blocked by our need to make the right response -- the
response acceptable to those we depend on. We have been
conditioned to avoid the wrong response -- acting in
accordance to how we feel at the core of our being -- by
the punishment we receive when we do act authentically.After
being conditioned, we no longer need to have the
punishing authority figures physically present because
they have taken up residence inside our minds, such that,
even in their absence, we anticipate and fear their
negative reactions. The effect of our false consciousness
is so powerful that strangers who share a resemblance to
the authority figures who conditioned us acquire the
power to trigger our conditioned responses and control
our behavior.

The Problems With Being False

Sooner or later, we discover that
living as a false self involves at least three serious
problems. First, we can never be happy living a life
designed to please someone else. Second, our real needs
for nurturing and healing go entirely unmet. The third
problem, which is really a blessing in disguise, is that
we are not capable of living such a false existence and
we cannot keep the lid on the turbulent emotions seething
under our calculated exterior.The
previously disowned thoughts, feelings, and actions,
which belong to the suffering child deep within our
consciousness, breaks through into our daily lives. In
spite of the previous hurt we have suffered and our
carefully made plans to avoid future hurt, the child
manages to take us on a journey in search of the love it
never had. Having been denied love, our inner child
searches for love everywhere -- at work, at school, at
church, with friends, and with family. While we may wish
to portray our painful relationships as something we can
either "take or leave", the truth of our
emotional involvement is revealed when the relationship
is not working, is threatened, or ends. The pain we
experience reveals our real need for love, previously
hidden from others and even ourselves, but now
frightfully exposed for all to see.

Creating A Life That Works

It is a person's inability to
maintain a false self, the breakthrough of the disabling
feelings of the wounded inner child, and the pain of
being unloved and unloving that brings many people into
therapy. This crisis and the need to get help is a
frightening prospect for most people. As we begin to seek
the help we need, our own history of mistrust,
self-protection, and our desire to hide works against us.
We are scared of the feelings raging inside, which we can
no longer control. There is no one we feel comfortable
being our troubled selves with -- no one we can share our
feelings with. We blame ourselves for our problems. We
hate and judge ourselves for our pain. We hate others for
hurting us. We don't want to talk about our relationships
or lack thereof. We envy people who have even a little
happiness. Yet, it has become painfully clear that
something must change in our lives. The question is,
"How can that change take place?"

What Has To Change?

It should be clear by now that we
are talking about the need for major change, and one
component of that change is gaining practical knowledge
about overcoming our conditioning. We spend a reasonable
amount of time in our lives learning math, reading, and
history, but most people have never been taught anything
like Human Development 101, Emotions 101, Relationships
101, or Happy Family 101. Effective therapy requires that
each of us become somewhat of an expert on the mind and
its tricks, and how we can become the driver of our own
bus, instead of just a passenger being taken on a wild
ride. The courses we really need are Controlling Our Own
Minds 101 or Knowing Our True Self 101.The long
and short of what I have said so far is that we have been
conditioned by our caretakers, and we can't get out. You
have to marvel at the human ability to learn, to be
conditioned, and to carry out behaviors without conscious
thought. Our lives depend on such an ability. The child's
needs and emotions further accelerate our learning. The
fear of the child and the need for love are powerful
motivators for learning our lessons, for getting things
right, no matter how destructive the lessons ultimately
prove to be.Unfortunately,
while our equipment works just fine, you have to shriek
in horror at what we have been programmed to do. An old
computer term for this is, "GIGO", or
"Garbage In, Garbage Out!" We have such a
beautiful ability to learn, but we've been programmed for
self-destruction.Another
amazing thing to keep in mind about the mind is that we
can be conditioned to believe things which are completely
untrue. In terms of our survival, it is critical that
we absorb the ways of the world -- beliefs about the
world and how things work-- from our elders. So we take
in beliefs, understandings, and meanings a long time
before we have any ability to evaluate them or question
their truth. If we learn from people whose beliefs are
faulty and whose lives don't work well, when we follow
those beliefs, our lives fail to work properly also.What is
worse is that our caretakers can instill beliefs in us
for their own selfish purposes, rather than to help us
survive and thrive. Our need for love, information, and
skills -- our dependency -- can be used by others to get
what they want for themselves. If an authority figure in
our life tells us something is true, we're likely to
believe it, even if we've just been told that we are the
worst child in the universe and that we are responsible
for daddy's drinking and our parent's divorce. Parent's
can use our belief in our badness, which they have
given us, to control us through our own angry self
judgments which lead to feelings of shame and guilt. The
child, trying to be good, wanting to be loved --
i.e. rewarded for being obedient -- takes what the parent
says as true and then makes it true for herself by
punishing herself with negative emotions, which make her
feel bad.

Unloving Caretakers, Unloving Minds

In many ways, our minds are just
like computers that execute programs of thoughts,
feelings, and actions without regard for value and truth.
In our society, we develop our minds and thinking as
tools for gaining advantage over others, as a technology
of domination, often without ethics. The misuse of power
-- exploitation of the weak, vulnerable, and immature --
is commonplace. Humanity, having created such a mind,
should not be surprised when the mind takes on a life of
its own.In this
way, to our own minds, each of us becomes just another
object to exploit and control. We have been programmed to
control ourselves with emotional cruelty, to the point
where we become emotionally disabled. Our own mind, which
has internalized the abusive drama enacted by our
caretakers, has become our biggest enemy. To regain
control of our lives, we must first regain control of our
minds. We cannot know ourselves, see what really is, and
make a nurturing choice, when we are lost in the pain
we've learned to create inside ourselves.

Changing Our Mind

The method I use to help people
change is a synthesis of psychological, energy, and
spiritual healing known as Rohun Therapy. Rohun
Therapy was developed 15 years ago by psychic Patricia
Hayes, who is the co-founder of Delphi Institute in
McCaysville, Georgia. Rohun systematizes the healing
process with regard to working on all levels of the
person as represented in the chakra system and the aura
-- spiritual, mental, emotional, and physical levels --
and in working at all levels of development, from the
emotionally overwhelmed state of someone first working
with childhood issues, through working with higher levels
of development, such as healing the shadow aspect
of the personality, integrating the levels of being,
integrating male and female aspects, and uncovering our
fundamental illusions.Breaking
down disabling mental-emotional-spiritual conditioning
which imprisons our true potential is a primary goal in
Rohun. I want to give you an image which might help me to
communicate how I see the process of deconditioning.Imagine
that there is one big you and lots of little you's, and
that the big you is a prison guard and the little you's
are prisoners -- each locked in a cell. They're locked in
there because they make trouble for other people. The
trouble they make is that they have a mind of their own
and refuse to do everything they are told to do without
question. The prison guard is your false self who doesn't
want any trouble from the prisoners -- your wounded child
parts -- and has to answer to the wardens -- your
parents, the ones in authority -- for any disturbance.Each of
the prisoners have emotional problems and have become
emotionally disabled. They have been driven mad by not
being allowed to be who they really are. Trapped in their
own madness, they have not been able to change
themselves. The prison guard cannot help them, does not
have the training to do so, and does all he can to keep
them in their cells and survive for himself. When the
prisoners really act up and the guard gets worried that
the wardens will get annoyed, the guard will abuse the
prisoners to get them to stop.The
prisoners, the prison, the guard, and the wardens are in
each of us. To heal, we must see clearly the parts of
ourselves that have been imprisoned. We must see the cell
and the guard -- the psychological mechanism which
imprisons us. We must see the wardens, the sentence they
have imposed, and the means they use to carry it out.

To Heal Is To Be Nurtured

I believe that the key to healing is
understanding the difference between what it means to
nurture someone and what it means to condition them.
Conditioning impersonally creates prisoners and prison
cells. When we condition someone, we do it from our own
selfish perspective in order to get them to comply by
becoming what we want them to be. We do not care about
their uniqueness, their individuality, for that only gets
in the way of them serving us. It would be better that
they have no individuality -- no needs, no wants, no
desires.Yet, we
know, you know, that everyone is different, everyone is
unique. I would argue that, in order for us to be happy,
we have to express that uniqueness, our individuality,
and it is our individuality that suffers under parents
who are insecure with themselves. Parents who do not know
themselves, and who were programmed not to know
themselves, cannot help their children to know themselves
either.By the
rules our parents grew up with, knowing yourself, having
a self, is selfish. They were supposed to sacrifice
themselves for the common good, and it's a lot easier to
do that when you don't really know who you are as a
unique individual.For the
most part, when people enter therapy, they are struggling
to have a unique, positive identity of their own
choosing. In the past, they were not allowed or helped to
exercise their free will in the creation of their life.In the
extreme, their identity -- who they are socially, who
they believe themselves to be -- is as their mother's and
father's suffering, dysfunctional, worthless son or
daughter. They know that they are not what they are
supposed to be, otherwise, wouldn't they be loved,
wouldn't they feel valuable, wouldn't they be happy?
Since they feel so much pain, they have come to believe
that pain is part of their essence, part of their
identity. They have come to believe, "I AM
pain", "I AM suffering", "I AM a
failure". Their continuing recreation and
re-experiencing of the abused, stifled child makes this
very believable.I want to
add that even conditioning that is done through positive
feedback, though rewards rather than punishment, can
shape the formation of a personality at odds with a
person's true potentials.How, then,
do we relate to a child so as not to condition them, but,
instead, to nurture them? To transform, to decondition, a
person's inner reality, both the therapist and the client
themselves must engage in an effective, cooperative,
systematic program of nurturing the client.

What Does It Mean To Nurture?

To nurture means to feed for the
purpose of growth. Growth to the limit of each person's
individual potential is not a goal of the society we have
grown up in. However, if we hope to be happy in our own
lives, we must make it an important priority for us.Imagine
for a second that this individual potential is a
beautiful, delicate, rare flower, one that requires the
utmost care and tenderness in its growth. Imagine that
when it blooms, it gives out the most heavenly scent and
brilliant, pure colors. Imagine that such a flower
blesses and uplifts each person who experiences it. This
flower is who you are. No less.The
natural child, the newly born, is such a flower, such a
precious flower. He or she is here to uplift humanity by
his or her very nature. We do not ask what we should do
with a flower to get it to serve us. It serves us by its
existence, by being what it is. We cannot improve upon
it. We are incapable of that. We can benefit from the
flower by appreciating it -- by simply taking in what it
is.If we want
to help it, we can do so by insuring that it has what is
needs to sustain itself, what it needs to flourish. We
nurture the flower when we serve it, when we dedicate
ourselves to supplying its needs.

We Are Not Our Minds

How do we do this for ourselves? We
must start with the understanding that we are not our
minds, we are not our thoughts, we are not our feelings.
While we are normally one with our thoughts and feelings,
fused with them, inseparable from them, we are also
capable of being aware of them. The fact that we can
observe our thoughts and feelings proves that we are
essentially different from them. If there were no
difference between thoughts, feelings, and us, we could
never tell them apart. So, we are the observer, not the
observed. We are consciousness itself. Yet, for most of
us, self-awareness exists more as a potential than an
actuality, but it is a potential we must develop.To develop
ourselves as an observer, we must give ourselves the
opportunity to observe. We must develop our capacity to
observe.Our
problem with observing ourselves is that we cannot be
neutral. Instead of observing, staying with bare
attention, when we try to just look at ourselves, we
judge ourselves instead. We always label what is
"good" or "bad" about ourselves.
We're always comparing ourselves to some standard created
in the past. We're always coming from that past, and
telling ourselves the same old story.And the
story is that we are bad, worthless, undeserving, stupid,
weak, etc., etc., etc. The message we've gotten from our
parents directly or indirectly, and the one we continue
to give to ourselves, is that we're unacceptable and
unlovable. Because we look with eyes made angry by hurt,
to look at ourselves is to judge ourselves and to hurt
and suffer. For this reason, we must develop in ourselves
an observer, a consciousness, which is not identified
with our conditioned thought and feelings, which is
beyond the sad drama of our lives, and so is capable of
seeing through the illusions which imprison us.

Rohun Teaches Self-Nurturing

In a Rohun session, we learn to use
our own consciousness as a tool for self-healing.
Initially, it is a poor tool. Because we come to therapy
angry, afraid, and hurting, we have little ability to see
things as they are or to be compassionate. This is to be
expected. It is no wonder why it is difficult for us to
look at ourselves. Yet, to heal, we must not only look at
ourselves, but learn to love and support ourselves in the
true sense of those words. To look at ourselves with
angry eyes keeps our prison cells locked tight.Most
people don't appreciate that we have a relationship with
ourselves that matters. Not only does it matter, but it
is the most important relationship we have. Most commonly
we focus on other people's opinions of us. We look for
love from them to make us feel valuable.The
wounded child parts of ourselves will stay in their cells
until it is safe to come out, and we cannot heal them
until they do. But, trust me, they're not stupid. They're
staying inside until the weather outside is fair. They've
learned that they can't count on us, let alone anyone
else. We've got to prove them wrong, and they're hard to
fool.In Rohun,
when we value ourselves, make a commitment to ourselves,
and create a safe, supportive emotional environment, we
can bring forward the parts of our consciousness that
need healing. Honesty and courage, self acceptance and
love are keys to the process, and as we practice Rohun,
we increase our capacity for these healing qualities.We can
observe the state of our consciousness as we experience
how we relate to ourselves -- how we respond to our own
inner images, thoughts, feelings, and behaviors -- how
judgmental or accepting we are to these expressions of
ourselves. What we want to see and to work with is the
nature and quality of our "relating", which
mirrors aspects of how we were related to by our parents.When we
have prepared a suitably safe, relaxed therapy
environment, we can invite the pained parts of ourselves
to come into our bodies and minds -- by allowing feelings
into our bodies, and thoughts and images into our minds.These
thoughts, feelings, and images are coming into us all the
time, and we are responding to them all the time, but we
are not consciously aware of what's happening within us.
We are on automatic, and the process is outside of our
conscious control.What we
begin to experience when we focus inwardly and slow down
the action are the pained parts of ourselves and our
refusal and inability to deal with them. We pushed these
hurting parts of ourselves, these hurt children, out of
our lives, out of our bodies and minds, long ago, and we
still don't know what to do with them and the experiences
they've had. They frighten us. Also, we still prohibit
ourselves from fully acknowledging how we were hurt by
the people who were supposed to love us. We can begin to
see how all avenues to healing, all exits, have been
blocked.Yet, we
come to learn in Rohun that there is a natural path to
healing when we open the gates to the truth of our
experiences. We have spent our childhoods protecting and
pretending -- afraid to admit the truth, to feel what we
must feel, and to grow in our capacity to accept and
forgive and let go. To some extent, we still want to be
children, and that child still wants the pain to
magically go away, and the good mommy and daddy to
appear.What we
learn instead is that the pain goes when we
release the pain we stuffed inside, when we stop
creating pain in our daily lives, and when we stop
choosing situations in our lives which recreate our pain.
We learn how to release the anger, sadness, fear, and
shame which, up until now, had no outlet, except to turn
inward and hurt ourselves. And we find that, having
released these destructive emotions, our mind becomes
increasingly capable of seeing things without distortion.As we
stick with such a process, we develop openness and
contact and awareness. We become present, instead of
absent. Given this treatment, the inner child parts of
ourselves are no longer alone, isolated, neglected, or
abandoned. They have a shoulder to lean on, and a body to
cry through. They can convert what is now is frozen pain
into an energetic release of the pain. Reconnecting with
permission to feel, to grieve, the negative emotional
energies we have stored over the years can be let go of,
and the negative beliefs about ourselves can be revised.Bringing
consciousness and light to an area of ourselves where
there was only darkness before is a truly spiritual
event, for in it, we are freeing ourselves to know and
love ourselves, and to set ourselves on a path of real
personal meaning and deep satisfaction. As we finally go
deep inside ourselves, we find that there is actually
someone there of great beauty and value, a uniqueness
that is us.

Rohun: An Example

I want to share with you part of a
recent Rohun session. In it, I was helping a client
expand his awareness about an event that had caused him
pain. He had recently cut off his relationship with his
father which had been a constant source of bad feelings
for him. His father could never allow him to feel good
about himself, and always dominated their conversations
with how good he, the father, was while refusing to give
any importance to his son. The client finally decided he
wanted no relationship with his father if his father
could not respect him and acknowledge him as a person in
his own right.The
painful feelings were triggered when my client's father
sent him a holiday gift signed, "Love, Dad",
rather than respecting his son's wish for separation, and
rather than addressing the underlying issue of how he had
treated his son. The gift was seen as just one more
instance of his father making himself happy, while
effectively ignoring this client's real feelings and the
painful step he had taken to end his relationship.I asked
the client to go inside himself and recall the disturbing
event, to feel the way he felt then in his body now.
Having allowed the feelings into his body, I asked him to
tune into what he was thinking, and what images came to
his mind. Doing this, he began to observe how his natural
response of anger was blocked from expression by his fear
of his fathers typically belittling, pain-inducing
response to him. Because he could not express his anger
directly and authentically, he expressed it instead, in
his mind, as a scathing negative judgment about his
father. The fact that he judged his father bothered him
because it was exactly what his father would have done, a
behavior he hated. So he judged himself for judging his
father, which made him feel guilty for doing so.
Underneath the whole exchange, you could sense how, in
spite of the fact that he had chosen to withdraw from the
relationship, the client still had a child part of
himself who still yearned for the possibility of real
love and respect from his father.What we
can see from this real example is that when our natural
responses are blocked, we quickly become disabled by the
reverberations of the unexpressed and unreleased negative
emotions in our body-mind. Rather than giving permission
for emotions to be communicated -- to become a shared or
common experience -- parents can easily control their
child by refusing to listen to him, and judging,
threatening, and shaming him for having such feelings,
which in the long run becomes the child's response to his
own emotions.

A False Self Gets False Love

In our attempt to maintain the false
self, which at best gets us false love, we allow
ourselves to be controlled by what we falsely believe is
in our best interests. We have been taught that to ignore
our real feelings and say nothing about them is in our
best interest. We have been forced to believe lies. We
have been forced to believe that expressions of hate and
the frustration of our parents is what it means to be
loved, a love we still need deeply.The key
point in our individual healing is to take the
responsibility for creating a safe, loving space within
our own hearts. We can no longer afford a cold-hearted
relationship with our true selves, one in which
aloofness, distance, denial, and disdain are passed off
as love. Without knowing how to love ourselves, without
knowing what love really is, we are unable to tell real
love from a convincing counterfeit. Without beginning to
fill the vast emptiness inside ourselves with real love,
we can easily fall victim to our own neediness, and find
ourselves, once again, living behind our walls with other
people who live behind theirs.Beyond the
issue of individual therapy, we need to support each
other and create a community of the heart where it is
safe to be ourselves. The time has come for all of us who
have been wounded to join together, not to stay as we are
and curse those that put us there, but to explore what it
is like to be in relationships based on speaking the
truth, based on openness and caring and trust, and based
on an abundance of love and nurturing. As we come to love
ourselves, and become accepting and whole within
ourselves, I believe we will find that our relationships
will be about each person's growth toward their soul's
unique potentials.

Ro-Hun Therapist Jay Kantor, Ph.D.,
holds a Doctorate degree in Psychology from Columbia
University and has studied healing for over 18 years with
the country's best healers, including Patricia Hayes
(Founder of Ro-Hun Therapy), Barbara Brennan (Hands of
Light), Rev. Rosalyn Bruyere, Dr. Robert Jaffe (Advanced
Energy Healing), Dr, Bill Baldwin (Spirit Releasement
Therapy), Dolores Krieger (Therapeutic Touch) &
Victoria Merkle (Energy Healing). He is Director of the
Ro-Hun Center of New Jersey, located at 145 Ayers Ct. in
Teaneck. He may be reached at (201) 461-7347.